Gaming

How to not be eaten by a grue, as revealed by me 26 years ago

I’d like to say I grew up on text adventure games, even though that would identify me as olde, but in reality the genre was already well-developed when I was in my teens. Still, I fondly recall getting nearly all of the Infocom games for my Commodore 64, during the period between 1984 and 1988. By 1989 the market had shifted, Infocom was making games with actual graphics and the text adventure pretty much died. It would be many years before freely-available interpreters and languages for writing text adventures would lead to a minor renaissance of the genre.

You can find information about a lot of the resultant games and more at The Interactive Fiction Archive.

Information on Infocom games can be found at Infocom – The Master Storytellers (and, of course, Wikipedia).

A text adventure was simple to learn–type your actions at a command prompt, read the results, repeat until you have solved all the puzzles in the game–but often the biggest puzzle was figuring out which words or commands the game could understand and the proper way to present them.

Back in that mid-80s era when computer graphics were less sophisticated (ie, crude, terrible) I spent many hours working through Infocom’s games. This was also my first bit of co-op gaming as I usually had a friend assisting me. Two brains will theoretically solve puzzles more capably than one. Until both brains get completely stuck, that is. That’s when you mail order the Invisiclues hint book and wait weeks to finally get an answer. It was the gaming equivalent of walking to school uphill in the snow both ways. And we liked it!

One of the key requirements of playing an Infocom game was making a map. Sure, you could try memorizing the game world and with some simpler titles it might even work, but making a map was essential for nearly all Infocom games. I’m fairly certain that utter madness was the only reward for successfully mapping out all of Zork I and its mazes.

I took to making most of my maps in a sketchbook and recently scanned in some of the more detailed maps. By the end I think I was playing the games more to make the maps than to play the actual games. Going back and looking through the maps also made me realize there are more than a few of these games that I left unfinished. Now they taunt me and I consider re-playing them using programs like Gargoyle or Windows Frotz to help make the experience more pleasurable than those halcyon days of yore with my Commodore 64 displaying 40 whole characters of text on a single line. 40! And I always knew I had successfully solved a puzzle because the 1541 disk drive would start grinding away madly to fetch a new chunk of game. Today I can use Trizbort to automate the mapping process entirely but I know if I do go back I’ll have that sketchbook at hand and start doodling again because it was part of the magic.

And a game without magic is just a game.

Here are the maps I’ve scanned so far.

First up is Zork I. The maze in this game (twisty passages, all alike) requires you to drop items in order to successfully map it out. Following all of these lines still gives me a headache. I never finished the game but I did finish the maze!

Next is Infidel, featuring ASCII hieroglyphics and even a start and end date for the game playthrough. How nerdy.

I have two Enchanter maps, the first image being from the start of the game and the second being the next area. I like the turtle.

And the follow-up area:

Finally the maps for Spellbreaker even includes 3D shading. Fancy!

Separated at birth: Tabula Rasa chapter

I have a co-worker who bears a strangely strong resemblance to the character I played in Tabula Rasa. I guess that means Tabula Rasa was fairly good at creating realistic-looking humans. That’s what probably doomed it.

Reference pic is below. The resemblance creeps me out a little. Note: my co-worker does not wear power armor.

The Simple life of Ferris Wheele, Part 3

Opportunities (Let’s Make Not So Much Money)

One of the random things that pops up in The Sims 3 are Opportunities. These can come from work, an acquaintance or based on your reputation/skills. They give various rewards when completed, sometimes including good old-fashioned moola. As Ferris has continued to cook, his skill has improved to the point where he actually successfully prepared waffles that were not burned black. Hooray!

Waffles, not scorched!

This, in part, led to him getting asked to make a group dinner for some neighbor and deliver it. I couldn’t figure out how to do it. I think I lacked a proper group recipe or ingredients or something. All I know is Ferris never runs out of cereal or waffles but neither is apparently acceptable for a group of party guests at the neighbor’s. Oh well.

Eating and dousing flames

Continuing on the food theme, Ferris’s eventual success with waffles may have made him overconfident, for his next meal ended up with the stove on fire. As you might imagine, this is not a good thing, as expressed by Ferris’s reaction below.

A little too well-done.

Fortunately, Ferris keeps his cell phone in his boxer shorts and called the fire department immediately. He then ate ice cream on the couch for dinner instead.

After the fire, ice cream.

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The Simple life of Ferris Wheele, Part 2

Getting Ferris a job was easy. He searched online and chose a medical career that is described as ‘organ donor’ and talks about working with bedpans. I am kind of glad the description doesn’t go into more detail than that. I think he’s supposed to be a candystriper. I wish I could login to a computer, click Choose Career and get started in a shiny new job. Stupid reality.

Once Ferris had a weekly routine imposed on him, things began getting trickier. For example, he was always sleeping until fully rested, which rarely gave him enough time to prepare anything beyond a bowl of cereal for breakfast. He likes to eat cereal, usually in his underwear. And not just for breakfast, almost anytime he’s hungry.

Breakfast of champions

Several times I had him attempt to make waffles. For some reason he puts them in a pan and tries to bake them in the oven. Each attempt has resulted in something blackened that almost set off the smoke detector.

Charcoal waffles, anyone?

Waffles, theoretically

He has had more success with Mac & Cheese and delicious grape pancakes. While Ferris is a mediocre cook, he is an even worse cleaner. The first batch of briquette waffles were left to fester on the counter until the odor was making him nauseous and bringing him down. I then instructed him to clean up and he obediently did. I’m hoping that he’ll eventually get into the habit of doing it on his own. His autonomy slider is all the way to the right, after all.

Wishing

Periodically wishes appear in your, uh, wish bucket, which can hold up to four at a time. They offer lifetime happiness points when fulfilled and enough points lets you buy a perk from a menu like this:

Lifetime rewards

In this case I chose the somewhat sucky Office Hero, which makes everyone at work like Ferris all the more. If Ferris continues to burn more than cook I make get him Discount Diner next — free meals at restaurants forever!

The wishes range from things like Read 3 Books to Visit the Art Gallery or Cook Waffles Without Destroying Them (actually, that last one is not a wish, just a vain hope). Ferris has visited the local graveyard, art gallery and more as part of his wish fulfillment and has taken tentative steps in learning how to better cook and do simple repairs. The latter has seen limited success, as evidenced below.

Sinktastrophe!

This resulted in a call to the plumber, though Ferris did mop up the kitchen floor on his own and without setting anything on fire in the process.

Artistically, Ferris is working on a painting (after getting an easel) and a novel, The Loneliest Yeti. I expect great things from these, especially after getting a lamp to put next to the easel so he could actually see what he was painting.

Socially, he has chatted with a few people and they are now listed as acquaintances, including Stiles. I had Ferris call Stiles up and invite him over, but bumbled the whole ‘going to the door and letting the guest in’ part because I thought Ferris would do that on his own. By the time I figured it out, Stiles had left for work. Oh well, he can always hit on him later.

Er, I mean, invite him over for a nice drink. I should probably get Ferris a stereo so he can play soft music, but he’s getting a bit low on funds. Cleaning bedpans doesn’t pay well.

Finally, the shower. I discovered that you don’t need to follow the normal morning shower ritual, just shower when the ol’ hygiene bar gets low and the reports of stinky start coming in. And yes, I applied the nude patch. Not because I have a prurient need to see naked video game guys, more because I wanted to see if Sims were virtual Ken dolls. Turns out they are. I think I was better off not knowing.

The Simple life of Ferris Wheele, Part 1

I bought The Sims 3 when it came out over a year ago and like most games let it promptly gather dust. It seems I’m more a collector than a player.

That said, I recently re-installed and patched the game and decided to give it another go. I like sandbox games as a rule, so being able to create and manipulate some poor slob’s world has an undeniable appeal to me.

I created a young adult Sim named Ferris Wheele. I’m a sucker for bad names, so I make no apologies here. Ferris was given five traits, ranging from Good Sense of Humor to Artistic. His favorite color is blue. His favorite food is sushi. He loves computers and longs to become a world famous author. He seems very easily excited.

Ferris wants a PC

After being given $16,000 in starter funds, I bought Ferris a dumpy little house in Sunset Valley for about 12 grand and moved him in. The tutorial advised that Ferris wanted a couch. As the house was unfurnished, I bought him a couch and had him sit on it. This made him happy. Ferris is a simple man.

He then wanted to go grocery shopping because there was a 20% off special that day at the store. Apparently Ferris is psychic, too. So I went and bought him food fit for a king:

Mmm, tuna and apple

An impoverished king banished from his kingdom, that is. Hey, I needed to save money for the rest of his house’s furniture. Ferris has no job!

After buying the groceries Ferris bumped into Stiles, another young man. Ferris told him amusing stories and made funny faces. Stiles was entertained and I think they may be friends now. Aw.

Once home, I bought a desk, chair and computer so Ferris could begin his writing career. Instead he sat down and began playing a computer game.

All work and no play make Ferris something something

With barely enough food for a single meal, a nearly unfurnished house, no job and no prospects, Ferris was very happy. Ferris is a strange man. I fear his bubble is going to burst soon.

Next time: Ferris and his wishes, trying to get a job and having a shower.

Starcraft 2 review (I never played it)

This isn’t a Starcraft 2 review since I don’t have the game and have no plans to pick it up, but a Quarter to Three thread in which the original poster wonders where all the reviews are (reviewers did not get access to the game until yesterday, when it went live via Blizzard’s battle.net player portal/matchmaking service) has some nice riffing from various posters on the most trite soundbites from potential reviews. The banter dies out after the first 50 posts or thereabouts in favor of the usual Internet arguments, so I’ll just highlight some of my favorites:

Of all the games to come out this year, this is definitely one of them!

It’s Blizzard’s best game ever as Wing Commander meets Warcraft in the white-knuckle thrill ride of the summer. It’s a visceral, seminal tour de force that’s part comic, part tragic, but all magic.

It’s more good than fun.

If I get my novel published, I can only hope someone describes it as “more good than fun”.

Honey, I shrunk me

One of the pieces of info you are typically asked to provide on a profile for a dating site is your height. I had measured my height long ago and recalled it as being slightly under 5′ 11″. Don’t ask me what that is in metric, it’s one of those things my head never wrapped around, probably because the closest equivalent to a foot in metric is the decimeter. Now think of how often you hear people talking about decimeters.

Today I whimsically decided to measure my height using the good ol’ ‘mark a line with a pencil on the door frame’ trick. It turns out I either mis-remembered or mis-measured, as it seems I am actually under 5′ 10″ — about 5′ 9¾” to be a bit more precise. I may have to start using metric instead. 177.8 cm kind of sounds impressive.

I am not sure how I feel about being a full inch shorter than I had always thought but I don’t think I like it. I feel slightly less manly now.

I’m off to rip a phone book in half.

On ‘social anonymity’

Scott Jennings has some interesting thoughts on social networking on his blog Broken Toys. You can read the entry here. The included quote he references is especially worthy. Sites like Facebook allow people to share every mundane event in their lives — and furnishes them the ability to create many more — but does so without the context that comes from everyday conversation that occurs face-to-face, so you are left with a jumble of random updates that don’t resonate or particularly inform. And yet some people post these non-essential bits of personal errata to the point where they wonder if they are becoming addicted to it. (I also realize the irony of talking about all of this on a personal blog.)

When I think about why I post the occasional update to a site like Facebook — which I clearly have a tepid like/hate relationship with — it basically comes down to one thing: attention whoring. I know there is a built-in audience of at least 29 people (my Friends list) and that others via proxy will also see my updates. Everything that’s posted is done in easily-digested chunks. There is no need nor even desire for in-depth discussion. In fact, discussion just gets in the way — it bogs things down and clutters up the page for the next update about not much of anything.

When I write a post here, it is either as a journal entry to myself — the jogging updates, for example — or because I want to muse on a particular subject or experience. Occasionally I post something that fits the Facebook criteria but that occurs less often. And on this blog, I do all of this with the knowledge that the audience is minuscule or accidental. The only time people are likely to see a post here is when I specifically link to it elsewhere. But here I can provide context, I can expand and ruminate. It doesn’t seem so much like attention whoring as genuinely sharing ideas and thoughts. How worthy those thoughts and ideas are is, of course, open to debate.

If I Like R.E.M. on Facebook, it’s a piece of trivia that is irrelevant to people in a general sense, if I write about R.E.M. here it will be something like my recent review of Accelerate that attempts to convey information or opinion with a smidgen of substance behind it.

Ultimately I don’t object to social networking because I can’t articulate why sharing a bunch of random trivia, photos, links and simplistic musings is a terribly bad thing. It just seems unnecessary.

My life as a single-cell organism

In the game Spore you start out as a single-cell creature swimming and surviving in the primordial soup. You then evolve through a number of other stages before ultimately achieving space travel. From there, if I understand correctly, you go on to conquer the universe. Who am I to argue with evolution?

These are my impressions of the first part of Spore, the Cell Phase. I will follow up with impressions on the other phases as I move through them.

***

Spore starts you out like a teenager in junior high school. You have a mouth, an overwhelming desire to eat and procreate and you’re tossed in with a bunch of others who will either flirt with you or beat you up.

The cell phase begins with you naming the organism that you will nurture and grow until its descendents can eventually conquer the universe in the far-flung future. I name my squiggly little guy Bob because I’m a fan of palindromes and Bob is a simple name for a simple guy. He’s single-celled, after all. My first big decision is whether to go herbivore or carnivore. Later you can switch-hit and become an omnivore, which  seems to have all the perks of herbivore and carnivore and no drawbacks. Going omnivore is like being at an all-you-can-eat buffet and liking everything you see, even that curious-looking macaroni salad that may not actually be macaroni. Choosing carnivore seems well-suited for dealing with competing cells  – just eat them! Herbivore feels like the underdog of this primordial soup. You eat the little bits of plant life you can find, assuming some pushy omnivore doesn’t get to them first – or decide that you look tastier instead. The carnivores, of course, only want to eat you.

Bob, evolved

I choose herbivore because I like rooting for the little guy. I give Bob a filter mouth suitable for eating the plant bits and a couple of flagella so he can swim around. He is ready to start evolving!

Bob quickly discovers just how harsh this cell vs. cell world is. The vegetable buds drifting through the water are scarce and there’s usually some mean-looking thing that has evolved into having Bob-crushing jaws hanging out nearby. The other herbivores also seem to have a metaphorical leg-up (actual legs come in the next phase) with little fins that let them swim faster to the food and chow down before Bob can. Bob perseveres, though, and eats enough plant matter to advance his DNA, not to mention his progress bar. He gets access to a mating call and by using it finds himself snuggling up with a doe-eyed cell.

This leads to the Cell Creator screen where the accumulated DNA can be traded in for various new body parts. I have minimal funds, so to speak, and decide that the best defense is a strong offense. Bob buys a nasty pair of spikes for the top of his “head”. If some other cell tries to give him the business, all he needs to do is hit ramming speed and they’ll be sorry!

To complement his new spikes, Bob also adds a pair of fin-like appendages that will allow him to turn faster, providing better control in the treacherous currents that he must ply.

When Bob returns to his existence of eating and hopefully not dying, he finds that life continues to be cruel. He may have spikes and fins now, but the other cells have poison, electricity and mouths the size of a city block to eat everything in sight. My brave little cell finds himself at one point sandwiched between two cell behemoths. I use the word sandwich deliberately, because that is what he became in short order.

Fortunately, in Spore death is a minor setback, as Bob simply respawns. With some nimble swimming he manages to find and eat enough buds to evolve his DNA to a level where he can grow legs. For a single- celled organism, legs are a pretty big deal. Bob is excited. He can now leave the water and start a new life on land, a life where he quietly hopes everything isn’t waiting to fry, poison or eat him.

Touching another man’s Wii

I promise the title of this post will be my first and only Wii penis joke. Really.

Tonight, three years after its debut, I finally got a chance to play around with a Wii, thanks to an invite from Nic to try his out. He got it for the best price possible — as a prize in a raffle. Nice!

We played some Lego Batman after I got the lowdown on how to use the wand and nunchuk controllers and I think I did fairly well for a newbie. I had to play as Robin but hey, it’s Nic’s Wii so if he wants to play Batman, he plays Batman, dammit (and after watching how many times he plunged to his death while using the bat glide suit, I wasn’t too concerned about playing the sidekick). In one particular room we managed to kill ourselves repeatedly. I would push the joystick on the nunchuk and press the A button on the wand and Robin, the boy wonder, would happily walk off into a vat of lava or some toxic goo. Repeatedly. Being made of Lego grants you a kind of immortality, however, so the sting of death is not severe. We made a pretty good team, I’d say.

After putting away Mr. Freeze and Clayface, we moved on to the pack-in game, Wii Sports, testing out Tennis and Bowling. In Tennis we played two games. Nic beat me fairly handily in the first round as my fatheaded guys ran around the court looking more like rejects from Lord of the Dance than tennis players. The second game, however, found Nic without his mojo as he bobbled nearly every volley, handing me an easy win.

After drawing in Tennis we played a round of Bowling and I’m a bit concerned about Nic dislocating his shoulder when he plays the real thing because he puts some serious English into his swing. And it works. He got 5 strikes in all and ended with three in a row after finding the “magic spin”. I did not find any magic whatsoever and managed no strikes, though I got a few spares to stave off a humiliating defeat. Neither of us got a gutter ball.

Overall, the Wii left me unimpressed with its graphics (though being on a standard def TV probably doesn’t help much) but the controls were easy enough to grasp. The precision left something to be desired, though (see the countless deaths in Lego Batman as an example). While the party games are fun, I can’t say I’ve got a huge urge to trade-in my Xbox 360 for a Wii just yet.

Still, I must win at Bowling, so my Wii play is not over.

M(icky) Mouse

These are apparently concept sketches for an upcoming game featuring Mickey Mouse for the Nintendo Wii. The game, called Epic Mickey, is being headed up by Warren Spector, who has worked previously on the decidedly un-childlike games Thief and Deus Ex. As you can see, the world being portrayed appears to be a bit dark. Much like the movie 9, this stuff would probably give little kids (a presumed target audience for the game) nightmares. I approve!

More art can be found here.